Israeli forces on Saturday expanded their offensive against Islamic Jihad by announcing the arrest of 19 members of this armed organization in the West Bank and launching new attacks against it in Gaza.
Twenty people were arrested by Shin Bet soldiers and security service agents in operations on Saturday morning, “including 19 members associated with the Palestinian terrorist organization Islamic Jihad,” the Israeli military said in a press release.
Iran-backed Islamist group
Israeli forces continued to bombard Gaza and the Islamic Jihad armed group to send rockets into the Jewish state in the early hours of Saturday, the worst outbreak of local violence since a brief war last year.
Israel presented the raids as a “preemptive strike” against Islamic Jihad, days after the organization’s leader was arrested in the occupied West Bank that raised fears of retaliation, an Israeli military spokesman, Richard Hecht, said.
Islamic Jihad, an Islamist group backed by Iran, has a strong presence in Gaza and the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
The Israeli army estimated that it had killed 15 Islamic Jihad fighters in its attacks that began on Friday afternoon, targeting weapons manufacturing sites in particular, according to him. The Gaza Ministry of Health has reported 10 deaths, “including a five-year-old girl,” and 79 injuries.
Worst matchup since May 2021
Al-Quds Brigades, Islamic Jihad’s armed wing, said it launched “more than a hundred rockets” on Israeli soil on Friday as a “first response” to Israeli strikes that killed one of the group’s leaders, Tayssir Al -Jabari. .
In Israel, no casualties or damage from the rocket fire were identified, the military reported. It reported 70 projectiles fired from Gaza, eleven of which landed inside the blockaded Palestinian enclave.
This is the worst confrontation between the Jewish state and armed organizations in Gaza since the 11-day war in May 2021, which left 260 dead on the Palestinian side, including fighters, and 14 dead in Israel, including a soldier, according to local authorities. .
Source: BFM TV
